


Harvest Moon

by Nemainofthewater



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Children, Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Halloween, Horror, Jon being a bit of a dick, Statement Fic, The Stranger - Freeform, mazes, takes place in series 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 03:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20941547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemainofthewater/pseuds/Nemainofthewater
Summary: Case #0040311, statement of Rachael Childe concerning a strange encounter at Millets Farm, Oxfordshire. Original statement given November 3rd, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.





	Harvest Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thingswithteeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/gifts).

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

-told you a million times that Halloween decorations are unprofessional, Martin! Maybe if you spent less time on this, this- American consumerism and more time on doing your actual job then you wouldn’t be so useless!

**MARTIN**

I-Elias said that I could-

**ARCHIVIST**

I don’t care what Elias said! I suggest that you get this-

[SOUND OF NOVELTY HALLOWEEN SPIDER WITH LARGE, RED EYES BEING TORN FROM THE CEILING AND THROWN TO THE FLOOR]

_Thing_ out of my archives as soon as possible!

**SASHA**

Come on Jon, don’t you think you’re being a little harsh?

**TIM**

Yeah boss, just because you got frightened by that plastic spider doesn’t mean-

[DOOR SLAMS SHUT. NOISE CUTS OFF. INDISTINCT AND VAGUELY ASHAMED MUTTERING]

**ARCHIVIST**

That’s better. Urgh. _Martin._

[CLATTERING NOISES. A CHAIR PULLED ROUGHLY OUT FROM BEHIND THE DESK]

Oh. That’s strange. How long has that-? Never mind. I must have just left it on.

[THROAT CLEARING]

Statement of Rachael Childe regarding a strange encounter at Millets Farm, Oxfordshire. Original statement given November 3rd, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

**THE ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I don’t really know where to begin. I don’t want you to think that I’m hysterical. Because I’m not. Hysterical that is. I don’t want you to give me a pat on the head and then send me on, safe in the knowledge that I’m just one more middle-aged white woman who’s taken Halloween too seriously. I’m here because…No one else will listen to me. Your Institute is my last chance, and I need to warn someone. About Them.

I’m a teacher. A primary school teacher at Stepping Stones Pre-Prep school. I’ve been one for, god, it must be almost a decade now. I went into teacher training late: I’d married my childhood sweetheart at eighteen and moved down to London with him, so most of my twenties was composed of looking after our two young daughters while also trying to earn enough money to actually live in London. We had a lot of beans when the girls were young-it’s amazing how versatile beans are. Not that I ever want to see another tin of baked beans again, but my point is that you can stretch a tin of beans pretty damn far.

My point is that I’ve been looking after children for over half my life. So when the headmistress volunteered me to be one of the chaperones on our annual trip to Millets Farm for the Harvest Festival I thought that it would be simple. The trip was to take place after the church service, giving the parents enough time to mingle and drink wine while the chaperones, myself among them, took the children around the farm. 

I’ve never really thought about it, but it’s strange, us celebrating the Harvest Festival, isn’t it? Singing hymns underneath the Harvest moon, this bizarre blend of pagan and Christian as we give thanks for another bountiful harvest. If fifty tone-deaf kids belting out ‘Big Red Combine Harvester’ counts as hymns of worship in any case. In any case, the Harvest moon was fairly late this year, Tuesday September 28th, and when we arrived at the farm it was to the sight of Halloween decorations littering the grounds.

And that’s. Fine. I’m not against fun, you understand, I just don’t understand why the country decides that as soon as August is over that they want to start carving up perfectly good pumpkins. The turnips at least make sense: I’ve never been a fan of turnips, horrible vegetables that they are, so if people want to put them to better use then it’s no skin off my nose. Pumpkins on the other hand… They’re so incredibly large- surely they could be put to better use than being carved into the same three designs and then left outside to rot for the next however many months until the birds and foxes finally dispose of them or they collapse into piles of rotting flesh.

The pumpkins at Millets farm in particular looked especially garish. They were everywhere, these huge, bulbous _things_ grinning back at me wherever I turned, and I couldn’t help but shudder. None of the other chaperones looked perturbed: mind you, Sue Khan was about a hundred and always gave off an air of having seen it all before, and I had seen Mary Forrest sneak at least three glasses of mulled wine during the service, despite the fact that we were on duty.

The children didn’t care: they surged forward in a wave of sugar-fuelled activity and scattered around the farm, five of the braver ones heading straight toward the maize maze.

How to describe the maize maze?

I suppose that if it had been light, it would have been easy enough. Just rows of corn twisting away in a frankly uninspiring maze. The plants were only slightly taller than me, which at 5”6 really isn’t that tall, and relatively spaced out: should worse come it worse it would be easy enough to force one’s way through the walls of the maze and escape that way. In the dark, illuminated by nothing more than the bright, full moon above and the eerie glow of the pumpkins, already being obscured by the mist, below? It was…atmospheric to say the least.

I jumped at the sound of a tinny cackle, glaring at the animatronic figure of a traditional witch at the entrance of the maze who was the likely cause.

“We should go in after them,” I said to the others, but my voice was weak and unconvincing. I simply didn’t want to, and it looked like they agreed with me: Sue had already wandered off to find somewhere more comfortable for her ‘old bones’ to sit and Mary gave a sharp bark of laughter at my tentative suggestion.

“They’ll be fine,” she said, “They can make their own way out.”

And then she turned around and started back toward Sue. I could tell that the only thing she was thinking of was getting home and her nightly glass of wine before having to wake up the next morning and doing this all again.

All at once, I felt angry. No, I felt furious. My own daughters were old enough that they had already left home and had lives and families of their own, but I could still remember them when they were young and small and utterly trusting, too naïve to realise what the world could be. Perhaps it was an overreaction and knowing what I do now maybe it would have been better if I’d gone and had a drink with Sue and Mary. But in the moment, I tutted at them both and strode confidently into the maze, after the children.

As soon as I entered, I knew that it was a mistake.

The walls of the maze stretched out in front of me, somehow so much more solid than they looked from the outside and wreathed in fog. There weren’t any pumpkins in the maze, the only light coming from the moon above me. I couldn’t see further than a few feet, and dark and indistinct shapes poked out at me. One of them was waist height, and I reached out to touch it, not sure whether or not I wanted it to be one of the children. My hand met cold ivory and I recoiled so quickly that I gave myself whiplash.

There, carefully placed against the maze wall, was a porcelain doll. She was dressed as a stereotypical witch, broomstick in one hand and grasping at a black cat. Her eyes were wide and blue and empty, and her mouth was stretched in a wide smile. She looked, god she looked exactly like little Tammy Wilcox.

All of a sudden, my bravado deserted me and was replaced by a shaky panic and I stumbled backward, only stopping once I hit the wall.

“Tammy?” I called out, “Matt? Henry? Daisy? Helena?”

My voice sank into the gloom of the maze and I knew that they would never be able to hear me. I could hardly hear myself. I forced myself forward, step by step, dragging my gaze away from the doll. It wasn’t her. I don’t know what it was, but it couldn’t have been her.

I don’t how long I wandered the maze. It felt like hours: painful hours where I stumbled through the varied twists and turns, keeping one hand trailing against the left wall so that I knew I would be able to find my way back. The cold seeped into my bones until I was foot-sore and shivering. I didn’t find any other dolls, but there was an abundance of grinning skeletons swayed in a non-existent breeze, or plastic spiders, their fangs dripping with blood.

All through it I kept shouting my lost children’s names: “Tammy, Matt, Henry, Daisy, Helena-”

Over and over again until my abused throat could take it no longer and I was reduced to croaking out their names, frantically, desperately: “Tammy, Matt, Henry, Daisy, Helena-”

Soon, I couldn’t even do that.

I think it must have been at least four hours later when I ran into him. He was young, with badly dyed black hair, and was dressed in a long black coat and dark jeans, though I couldn’t tell if that was what he normally wore or if he was in a costume. There were bags underneath his eyes, visible even in the omnipresent fog, and I thought that he must have been a student with a part time job at the farm, or something like that.

“Rachael Childe?” he asked.

“Yes,” I mouthed, still unable to properly speak.

He frowned at me and, taking me gently by the elbow, started guiding me through the maze. _Wait_, I tried to say, tried to make him stop and tell him about the children, but I couldn’t speak loudly enough, and I don’t think he would have listened to me anyway. He was holding a book in his right hand, the one that wasn’t gripped around my elbow, and whenever we would come to a turn he would pause briefly and consult it. Blinking, I noticed that the dark smudges on his hands weren’t my imagination, or the product of a leaky pen as I had assumed, but eyes. Simple eye tattoos over every knuckle of his fingers that looked like they were glowing under the pale light of the moon. 

Soon, miraculously soon considering how far I thought I’d walked, we were stumbling out of the maze and back into the cheerful horror of the farm proper. I could have wept with relief, seeing the tacky pumpkins.

“Mrs Childe!”

I looked over and there they were. The children, standing in a clustered group around Sue Khan. They looked fine, if a little subdued, and the tension inside me evaporated. Without the adrenaline keeping me moving, I sagged to the ground, acutely aware of my raw feet and my aching legs. It was Sue who had cried out and she came running over to me now. Irreverently and slightly hysterically, I had the mental image of her tripping over a pumpkin and tumbling back, head over heels, but she made her steady way toward me and before I knew it was peering into my wild eyes and gently touching the scratches and bruises from my panicked stumbles in the dark maze.

“What happened to you?” she demanded, “The children said that you were right behind them!”

“We were worried,” Tammy Wilcox said. She didn’t look worried though. Her eyes gleamed, bright and slightly glassy like marbles. Trembling, I reached forward, trying to draw her toward me-

-and all I could feel was smooth ivory.

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends.

A Rachael Childe was indeed employed at Stepping Stones Pre-Prep school in 2004, and going through the records for Millets farm we’ve found that there was a school trip there on September 28th 2004\. 

In the supplemental notes attached to the file, there are hospital records that show that Rachael Childe was diagnosed with severe shock and was admitted to the John Radcliffe for overnight monitoring.

Mrs Childe returned to work as soon as she was released from hospital, but was forced into mandatory leave a few days later, whereupon she came to make her statement at the Magnus Institute. She was subsequently fired a few weeks later: official records show that it was due to unprofessional behaviour, but Sasha managed to contact Mary Forrest who told her it was because Mrs Childe would go into crying fits at the sight of some of the children, separating them from the rest of the class.

Mrs Childe never returned to the Institute for follow up, and all attempts to contact her failed, so her statement was archived and subsequently lost in Gertrude’s idea of a filing system from where Martin unearthed it a few weeks ago, although he honestly might have not bothered. Sasha tried to get some contact details for her from her old work colleagues, but apparently the Institute isn’t the only one who couldn’t find her as a missing persons case was filed a few weeks after the incident and she appears to have disappeared off the face of the Earth, abandoning her husband and two daughters.

There was no sign of this alleged farm ‘employee’ who led her out of the maze, and though I sent Tim over to talk to the farm owners, we couldn’t find any employees who matched that description.

I believe this is a clear enough case: Mrs Childe evidentially had a nervous break-down of some kind, possibly due to the unseasonable fog and an impressionable mind. I really don’t know why Martin bothers to bring me these open-and-shut cases.

Just one more thing. According to her daughters, a week after she vanished, they received a parcel in the post from her. It was a severed doll’s head.

Recording ends.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on Tumblr as [Nemainofthewater ](https://nemainofthewater.tumblr.com)


End file.
